Online Community Management For Dummies®

Chapter 15

Fostering Community Growth with Offline Activity

In This Chapter

• Establishing yourself as a public speaker
• Attending conferences, trade shows, and other events
• Setting up fun educational experiences

You may think that as an online community manager, all your work will involve online endeavors. Actually, though, you'll want to make sure that you're not overlooking offline efforts to attract members to your online community.

In this chapter, I tell you what you need to know to use speaking engagements, events, classes, and more to grow your community.

Why You Need to Go Offline to Grow Online

There may come a time when you'll feel that your social networking and other online outreach has hit a plateau. It happens, and it's not a reflection on you. Summer months in particular are notoriously slow, for example. Still, your job as community manager is to grow a community, and you can't do that if no one is biting.

At other times, you want to bring in new members regardless of plateaus and traffic numbers. New members liven up the conversation; the same people talking about the same thing gets old quick. Bringing in new members keeps the conversation and atmosphere fresh. There's a fine line between community and clique. By bringing new members in, you're ensuring you have the former, and not the latter.

Your members aren't always online. Not everyone is doing an online ...